July 16, 1995
By Rod Hafemeister
Belleville News-Democrat
Thousands of Gulf War veterans may be victims of biological warfare, infected with a disease created in a U.S. laboratory and sold to Iraq, a top cancer researcher believes.
One local veteran of Operation Desert Storm says if the researcher is correct, it could explain the mysterious ailments that have plagued him since his return from the Persian Gulf four years ago.
"I guess the thing that scares me the most is I've had chronic fatigue," said Chuck Bauman, who served in the Gulf with an Army Reserve helicopter unit based at Scott Air Force Base.
Chronic fatigue is one of the most common complaints of the 50,000 to 100,000 veterans claiming they became ill as a result of their service in the Gulf. Other common symptoms of so-called Gulf War Syndrome include joint pain, memory loss, unexplained rashes, depression and diarrhea. Many of those symptoms can be explained by mycoplasma infections, says Garth L. Nicolson, chairman of the Department of Tumor Biology at Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas in Austin.
Mycoplasmas are uncommon organisms not often found in nature. They are more complex than bacteria, but unlike a virus usually can be treated with antibiotics. They normally produce relatively benign diseases such as urinary tract or respiratory infections, Nicolson said.
They also are not easy to detect. Nicolson and his wife, also a biomedical researcher, developed a technique that identifies specific gene sequences in a patient's blood. What they found shocked them.
Of 75 Gulf War veterans they studied, most of whom served on special operations deep inside Iraq, more than 40 showed evidence of mycoplasmic infection.
Worse, about 25 carried a gene sequence not normally found in mycoplasmas - a gene sequence from another disease that allows the mycoplasmas to infect and hide in normal cells.
"Our hypothesis is that it would be extremely unlikely that these organisms, with their very unusual gene sequences, would have arose naturally in the wild. In all probability, they were genetically modified," Nicolson told the Belleville News-Democrat.
"It looks like they just inserted a few genes in it to make it more pathogenic" or able to produce disease.
Nicolson believes, but cannot yet prove, that the modified mycoplasma was created in a laboratory in the United States as a biological warfare weapon and sold to Iraq.
"It has no other use. It's a human pathogen, so how could you justify it except as a biological weapon?" he said. "How it was transferred to the Iraqis, we don't know. A lot of stuff was being transferred right up until about two weeks before Desert Storm."
In a series of hearings from 1991-94, former U.S. Sen. Donald Riegle, D-Mich., revealed that U.S. companies continued to ship chemicals and biological materials to Iraq even after the Allied buildup began when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Riegle also concluded some soldiers in the Gulf were exposed to chemical and possibly biological weapons, but Dr. Steven Joseph, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said he has seen "no persuasive evidence that there were chemical or biological weapons used in the Gulf." Last week, a Pentagon spokesman dealing with Gulf War Syndrome told the News-Democrat he had not heard of mycoplasmic infection.
"We're certainly interested in listening to anybody," he said. "We're certainly willing to take any help we can get."
Besides being chairman of the largest cancer center in the world, Nicolson is a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and a professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. He is author or co-author of more than 400 articles in medical journals and has spent 30 years studying cell structure and how genes control cells. He also chaired the medical panel at a conference in March of Gulf War veterans from all 50 states.
But Nicolson said he's run into brick walls trying to get his message out. He cited attempts to block publication of his findings by the government and administrators at his own university trying to discredit him as a scientist and prevent him from working on Gulf War Syndrome theories. He believes it is because U.S. companies sold dangerous materials to Iraq even while U.S. troops were preparing for war against the Arab nation. "Profit. There was big money in this stuff. Saddam Hussein was spending a lot of money for high-tech stuff," he said. "Essentially, they're just throwing these guys (veterans) to the wind to cover up some illegal transactions. This stuff had to have approval at the Department of Commerce, at the Department of Defense - there's got to be records somewhere."
Nicolson said if his theory is correct, bringing the disease under control could take a long time.
"There is no control on these things. Once they're released, they go everywhere. They infect everybody. You would think that we would have learned."
Nicolson says mycoplasmas probably are not the sole cause of Gulf War Syndrome and agrees with government scientists who believe they are dealing with a variety of causes and diseases.
But he thinks they need to look harder at mycoplasmas and other modified organisms.
"We're really afraid that a lot of these people have combinations of biologics," Nicolson said.
Many of the Gulf War veterans whom Nicolson studied were Green Berets, Navy SEALS or Delta Force members. Military special operations sources say that many were involved in missions to identify and destroy Iraqi chemical and biological weapons plants and storage sites.
Other victims, including Nicolson's own step-daughter, served deep inside southern Iraq as part of or in support of the 101st Airborne Division. Blackhawk helicopters flew into and landed in that region several times a day, said Bauman, the Army reservist based at Scott.
He's now focusing on another of Nicolson's findings - that about 75 percent of those with mycoplasma infections have recovered after being treated with a simple antibiotic called doxycycline.
Bauman said his doctor has agreed to send a blood sample to Nicolson for examination and start him on the antibiotic.
"It looks to me like the worst thing that could happen is you
take the pills and it's ineffective," Bauman said.
(c) 1995 Belleville News-Democrat